The power of sustained attention

An easy way to place oneself into the Gospel this Sunday is to go outside near a public area without your smartphone for a solid ten minutes. After your initial sense of feeling naked and vulnerable without one wears off, begin to notice what observations rise to the surface. For sure, you may notice a handful of people who will be cut off from the real world and absorbed into a virtual one through handheld devices. But you might also be surprised to find someone along with you who is paying attention to the world around them, to what is real.

This Sunday’s Gospel describes Jesus’ keen observations of human nature. He warns about the outward behavior of scribes and the crowds and contrasts them to the widow. “He sat down opposite the treasury and observed,” says the Gospel, “how the crowd put money into the treasury” (Mk 12:41). When the Gospel describes Jesus as one who “observes,” it uses a verb that carries the meaning of sustained attention with an intent to comprehend the present situation. It describes being awake mentally and spiritually. Jesus’ observation helps him to perceive the reality of a poor widow in this scene. 

“The widow” is a sustained motif throughout all of Scripture. As a motif, widows are often paired with orphans and outsiders without legal status in a community. The poor widow is a double threat to society in the biblical world. She can be a burden to the limited resources of a family or town. She also brings out a tension, a source of concern as someone who is not accountable to any one because she holds no real status in society and therefore might upset the status quo. The widow, along with the poor, are guilty of being a nuisance to society by the sheer fact of choosing to exist and remain in the world. As a widow, she is easy to ignore as she holds an invisible role in society. In the Bible, however, people of her status always receive God’s consistent attention. The way she is treated is the measure by which God will judge that community from a moral and religious point of view. In that sense, the widow is powerful in the eyes of God.

Jesus understands her place in Scripture and her value in the Gospel that he is preaching. “Amen, I say to you,” says Jesus to his disciples, “this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury” (Mk 12:43). The others, especially the rich, apparently gave from their abundance, while the poor widow gave from her poverty. Jesus recognizes that she gave everything she had into the Temple treasury. She is much like the widow from today’s first reading who was willing to give her last bit of flour and oil to Elijah during a spell of famine. “Just now I was collecting a few sticks,” says the widow to Elijah, “to go in and prepare something for myself and my son; when we have eaten it, we shall die” (1 Kgs 17:12). Their generosity in both cases is observed and noticed by the prophets in their midst. 

Does anyone else notice?

The widows in both readings this Sunday appear to be showing a way forward in discipleship. You do not have to have much to make a worthwhile sacrificial offering. Today that means using up your time, your limited resources and especially your faith that has grown dull with the passing of years. None of that matters as much as the sacrifice of attention that we can give the widow, orphan and stranger in our midst. It is a contemporary mandate that finds its roots throughout all of Scripture. It begins with a sustained good look at what is real around us.